Laura Lippman’s Novel, “Lady in the Lake”
Sometimes you’re hot. Sometimes you’re not. Sorry to say, this time you’re not, Ms. Lippman. You ran this one right off the rails. Hey, it happens to all artists once in a while. I saw – read – it happen with Lee Child, Kate Atkinson and even, yes even John Sandford. Perhaps we can blame it on the publishers who force you superstar novelists into meeting impossible deadlines. Who can write a brilliant book once a year?
I know it takes me more time than that, not to just to produce a first draft but to hone and revise it multiple times until I’m convinced it’s good enough for the public. I have a sneaking suspicion this is what happened with “Lady in the Lake” – it reads like a first draft, written either completely or almost so straight from your head to your fingers. IMO, one of the telltale signs is how you jump from scenes and characters each chapter, often without so much as clue as to who’s narrating now, or what’s supposed to be going on, or why you’re giving a chapter to this minor character, or how all these too-many different people and incidents are supposed to fit together.
Did you have an editor at William Morrow? Or did they just slap your Word file into InDesign and start printing covers? Because if you did in fact have an editor who read this manuscript and let it go to production in this rough shape, you need a new editor. I found what I call logic bombs in almost every chapter.
This work is just plain sloppy, Ms. Lippman, and if I were you, (1) I would already know it, and (2) I wouldn’t be reading the reviews, because I’m not alone in giving “Lady” a thumbs-down. I’m going to re-read Chandler’s novel, whose title you appropriated.
And I would also proffer this advice: don’t rush your craft. You’re a good writer – not great but good, and I’ve enjoyed several of your earlier novels. Writing a book is a precious experience, and I believe we ought to give the literature we write our best efforts, regardless of pressures from the publishers – hey, we are creating art, here! – we don’t let it go out into the world until we are utterly convinced that it’s ready.
August 22, 2020 @ 9:06 pm
Good to see someone call a hot-shot author and/or his or her editor on their apparent lack of concern for quality product. Seems most successful authors today–meaning the money makers–edit their own works. Just throw it at the walls, see what sticks because they’ll sell, anyway. Screw quality. Self-published authors are dragged over the coals for a couple typos, though, admittedly, it’s usually a couple hundred or more. One of my favorites had eighteen errors in the first two-thirds of the last of his books I read. The last. Sorry, no more…Sue Grafton told me once she edited all her books in the later years. And it was hard to find more than two or three typos in her works. Goes to her literacy quotient… I often wonder, when reading some of these tomes, if the term “editor” has a meaning related to editing. In the earlier days of my reading habit the editing didn’t catch my eye. Don’t know if it’s because the quality of writing and editing was better then, or because I was so dumb I didn’t recognize an error when I saw one… Thanks for a take on something we need more of, a more critical eye. With the cost of books theses days, in any form, we deserve better.